Power From the People
Brian Doherty at Reason - it is not hard to generate your own power, from any sort of plant matter, with old technology, a "gassifier". A group of bohemian machine-artists, spearheaded by Jim Mason, did it on a fairly large scale in San Francisco, when their grid power was turned off over building code violations. This kind of locally-generated power may provide a better solution to America's energy problems than taxes and regulations on centralized power. It's also carbon-neutral, for those in the audience who care about that (not me). [root]
The costs in time and sanity borne by Mason and his crew were apparent. They were also far beyond what most of the non-art-obsessed will want to pay. But so were the innovations that arose from, say, the Homebrew Computer Club of Silicon Valley, that mid-'70s gang of PC enthusiasts--including a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak--dedicated to DIY computer making. Yet from the homebrewers' irrational enthusiasms arose the modern world of personal computing.
We haven't reached the point where flicking a switch for coal-fired power from far away seems as inadequate as the five-mainframes-for-the-nation computer vision that the proto-hackers of the '70s were rebelling against. But Mason notes that all sorts of human endeavors, from our computing to our food to our transportation, have evolved away from bare resource economizing. They've become instead arenas for play and assertions of identity--or, as Mason likes to think of it, areas in which there is at least some opportunity to impress girls.
"We can turn power into something experiential, expressive, personal," he says. "Not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be explored, like the cultural movement in food from a thing you eat for raw energy to food as an idiom of pleasure, creativity, and expression, an excuse for gathering friends and family.
"Computing had a similar transformation. It wasn't until the computer became an idiom of personal expression that it exploded into something ubiquitous as clothes on our body.
